Personal care products are well known and widely used. These products have long been employed to protect, cleanse and moisturize, deliver actives, hide imperfections and reduce the oiliness and shine on keratinous surfaces. Personal care products have also been used to alter the color and appearance of skin and hair. A variety of personal-care compositions are available to provide skin care benefits and to help prevent and even counteract what many consumers consider to be undesirable “signs of skin aging” (e.g., fine lines, wrinkles, and uneven skin texture). Of these benefits, look and feel are generally considered to be the two most important and desired effects by consumers.
Traditionally, a wide variety of different functional materials are combined in a single skin care product in an attempt to deliver a range of look and/or feel benefits to consumers. For example, a conventional skin care product might contain skin actives such as humectants to improve the condition and health of the skin, emollients to lubricate the skin, powders to provide a skin feel and immediate skin appearance benefit, and/or UV actives to absorb skin damaging ultraviolet radiation (“UV”).
Humectants are well known in the skin care industry, and may be incorporated into a personal care composition to provide a multitude of skin health and appearance benefits, such as increasing skin translucency (e.g., by less surface scattering and reducing refractive index gradients in the stratum corneum), reducing visible texture (e.g., by plumping of the stratum corneum) and generally improve skin function and strength. Glycerin is a commonly known humectant used widely in the field of cosmetics. It is not uncommon for glycerin to be incorporated into skin care compositions at relatively high levels to maximize the skin health benefit it provides. But glycerin is a relatively viscous, sticky material, and high levels of glycerin can feel undesirably sticky and heavy on the skin. Moreover, high levels of glycerin on the skin can make it look undesirably shiny and greasy, at least in part because glycerin is slow to absorb into the skin.
UV agents are also well known in the field of skin care compositions and impart a film that protects skin against the damaging effects of exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun. UV agents absorb and/or diffuse UV before it can interact with and damage skin. The ability of a composition to protect skin from UV is usually expressed as a sun protection factor (“SPF”) rating. Combinations of UV agents are typically used in personal care compositions in order to raise the SPF rating of the composition and to offer broad spectrum protection for damaging UV (e.g., UV-A and UV-B). However, many UV agents (e.g., liquid UV agents and oil-soluble solid UV agents) are oily materials. Thus, while the ability of a sunscreen composition to protect skin from UV may be improved by adding UV agents, the resulting composition may have a heavy oily skin feel.
In some instances, particulate materials may be added to a personal care composition to address the undesirable skin feel and look properties imparted by one or more ingredients in the composition, such as glycerin or liquid UV actives. For example, micronized or spherical polymer particles may be used to provide feel, visible texture and/or wrinkle reduction benefits. Such particulate materials may provide an immediate visible texture (e.g., lines and wrinkles, pores, bumpy surface) reduction benefit to the skin by diffusely reflecting light, thereby providing a matting effect to the skin. In another example, particles may be added to a conventional skin care product to address the undesirable feel properties of a component ingredient such as glycerin (e.g., reduce the tacky feel). However, there are tradeoffs when attempting to increase these feel and look benefits. In some instances, the relatively high levels of powder required to provide the desired benefit may lead to products that are hard to spread on skin and/or products become noticeably white and can flake off the skin. In some instances, even incorporating relatively high amounts of powder may still fail to provide a suitable reduction in undesirable feel properties such as tackiness or oiliness. Further, some particulate materials may act as opacifying agents, which can turn the consumer product into make-up or make-up like product. While opacifying agents can provide a color benefit to a target skin surface, opacifying agents can also cause an increase in the visible texture of the skin, thus making undesirable textural features of the skin (e.g., wrinkles, pores, bumpy surface) more visible rather than hiding them.
Therefore, a need exists for a personal care composition that provides improved look and feel characteristics when used in conjunction with a conventional skin care composition. In particular, there remains a need for a personal care composition that improves the undesirable look and feel properties of a conventional skin care composition when applied as an overlying layer to one or more underlying base layer(s) of skin care compositions, which contain high levels of ingredients with undesirable feel and look properties, such as humectants and UV agents. There is also a need for a personal care composition that provides improved look and feel characteristics when used in conjunction with a conventional skin care composition and includes little or no pigments or colorants.